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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

So often what we learn from the nightly news is generic or impersonal. Even the human interest stories they show only touch the surface of complex situations. So when a memoir comes along to expand on our knowledge of historic and recent events, it is invaluable. Of course, a memoir by definition takes only one perspective and so has an inherent bias in its recounting. In this case, Tamara Chalabi a Lebanese-Iraqi, daughter of Ahmad Chalabi, one of the sources of perhaps questionable intelligence that led to the the American invasion in Iraq, writes a heartfelt and moving history of her family, their life in Iraq, and their subsequent exile from the country they loved.

Starting back in the early nineteen-teens, Chalabi opens the multi-generational tale of her influential and politically important family by introducing her great-grandfather, grandfather Hadi, and soon-to-be grandmother Bibi. She weaves the external happenings in the area that is soon to become the country of Iraq with the major personal events occurring in her wealthy family. Using the memories of her elderly relatives and what she remembers from her formidable grandmother, she constructs a tale of an elite family, political insiders despite their Shi'a religious identification in a country ruled by the Sunni, a family whose personal history is inextricably intertwined with the complex history of this troubled Middle Eastern country from its time as a part of the Ottoman Empire to its birth as an independent country mentored by the British and on through to its recent turbulent and violent history under Saddam Hussein and beyond.

This is neither dry history nor completely undocumented family memoir. Chalabi's family held governmental positions in most incarnations of Iraq's government until the coup d'etat that resulted in the deaths of everyone in the royal family. The men in the family earned immense wealth and had the ears of those who held the reins of power. The women, whose lives were more proscribed due to their religious beliefs and cultural mores, ruled the domestic sphere and contributed to their husbands' successes, especially Chalabi's diminutive, whirlwind grandmother Bibi who is a major presence throughout the bulk of the story.

The bulk of the tale centers around the unrest and turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century around Bhagdad, laying the groundwork and explaining the reasons that the situation today exists. Chalabi tries to be evenhanded in her criticisms of the West's dealings in the area but there are times when her anger towards Britain and the US seeps through. The weaving of the personal, the political and their extreme interconnectedness is done quite well, keeping the reader's attention through each narrative shift. The end of the book and the current lives of the Chalabis, especially Tamara's father Ahmad, feels much more rushed than the rest of the story though. It is possible to feel the nostalgia and yearning for a vanished time and place when Chalabi writes of the older generations but the feelings of exile are less complete when she tackles her own and her cousins' similar but confused feelings. And perhaps this would always hold true of a generation not born in country but it is a marked contrast and a definite weakness compared to the strength of feeling of previous generations. A look into a misunderstood area of the world through the eyes of one of its own, although certainly not an unbiased telling, an insightful one indeed.

Follow the rest of the blog tour for Chalabi's Late for Tea at the Deer Palace or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

A multiple book week. I think of these as the universe's way to reward me for sticking it out with Doctor Zhivago. This past week's mailbox arrival:

Other Waters by Eleni Gage came from St. Martin's Press.Just the cover of this one makes me swoon. But the story, the story! Its premise grabs me too: an ancient curse sends Maya from her happy Manhattan life back to India.

The Pioneer Woman by Ree Drummond came from Willim Morrow for a book tour.Ree Drummond sure can cook. I'm looking forward to reading about how she went from city girl to cow girl who cooks.

Walter's Muse by Jean Davies Okimoto came from Endicott and Hugh Books for a book tour.Another cover that makes me swoon; be still my water-loving heart. And count me in for anything set on an island!

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit At Home With Books as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Saturday, January 28, 2012

The internet and e-mail have really taken a toll on letter writing. Now that we have instant gratification, we are losing out on the simple joy of opening the mailbox to find an unexpected or conversely eagerly awaited missive from a far away friend. Now we mostly find bills instead of handwritten personal thoughts. The closest we often get anymore is the fake "handwriting" font on some junk mail envelopes. This is such a shame. Letter writing is careful and slow and often brings great delight to the recipient. I know, because I still write letters (although not nearly as often as I used to) and I had many, many penpals from all over the world as I was growing up. I even still keep in touch with several of them, having been writing to them for almost 30 years now. Hearing from them way back when opened a new world to me, one that I didn't encounter in the many suburban neighborhoods we lived in throughout my childhood.

Australian Geraldine Brooks grew up in a Sydney that she feared was provincial. Her lower middle class neighborhood was mocked as a representation of all that was boring and backwards about Australia. In order to broaden her horizons, taking after the example of her father, she started to write letters. Her first penpal, Sonny, was only just across town but could have lived a world away. After Sonny, Brooks chose penpals in countries that interested her. She wrote Joannie in America, intrigued by the country of her father's birth. She wrote Mishal in Israel because she was fascinated by Judaism. When she found out that Mishal was an Israeli Arab, she found another Israeli, this time a Jewish Israeli, Cohen, to add to her collection of penpals. And finally, enamoured of the student upheavals in France, she also wrote to Janine. Through all of these penpals, she learned more of the world. Twenty years later, during her father's final illness, she discovers the letters of these penpals and wonders where life has taken them. Like the journalist she is, she determines to discover their stories.

Brooks has drawn the Australia of her childhood precisely and lovingly. She chronicles her own political awakening and leanings and their genesis very well. And she has created a full and extensive portrait of her correspondence with Joannie and with the social consciousness that both girls developed as they wrote back and forth. Her letters from the others are either less illuminating or she wasn't given permission to use as much from them since the sections about these penpals are not as full and lack the sprightly, in-depth personality that the portion about Joannie has. Once Brooks goes on her search for her lost penpals, she has an amazingly easy time of it finding them. The fact that all of them ultimately welcomed her in to see their lives now (well, ten years ago when the book was written anyway) is wonderful.

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir both for its portrayal of the disappeared Australia of Brooks' childhood and adolescence and for the tale of tracking down her former penpals to see where their lives had taken them. I had an Australian penpal as a child and young adult, a couple of decades after Brooks, and I'd love the chance to do as Brooks did and find her. Michelle Ennor, are you out there somewhere? In any case, Brooks's memoir captures the innocence of a younger Australia, uncovers the seeds of her own life choices, and shows how our early life shapes us as well as the ways in which we find ourselves yearning for a different future than we had ever envisioned.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Marissa Bennett is going home. She's just been through an emotionally devastating divorce so she's headed to the small Ohio college town she once couldn't wait to leave and where she is the new YA librarian. She arrives home in the middle of one of the town's many parades, literally right in the middle. Having taken a wrong turn, she is now a part of the parade until the sheriff waves her off the route and chastizes her. Worse than the embarrassment, it turns out that the sheriff is Connor Doyle, the first boy she ever loved and to whom she gave her virginity when she was in high school and he was at the local college.

Much as Marissa would like to avoid Connor, there's no way that she can. She ends up getting an apartment next door to his and then her pet project to connect with youth at risk is combined with a similar outreach Connor has developed. The two of them fight their attraction to each other despite their enforced proximity. Connor is haunted by the demons that drove him from his law enforcement job in Chicago to this tiny bucolic Ohio town. He still has nightmares about having a child die in his arms after gang related violence in Chicago. Marissa, on the other hand, is still reeling from the death of her less than one year old marriage to a cheating husband. She signed the divorce papers on what should have been her first wedding anniversary. Neither of them feels safe committing to anything close to a relationship and yet as they work together with the kids in their program, they draw ever closer.

In addition to Marissa and Connor, there are quite a few minor characters, including Connor's loony mother and grandmother, determined to marry him off, Marissa's menopausal and emotional mother, Marissa's self-absorbed and oblivious father, her irritating sister, and assorted townsfolk. Some of the characters are colorful and add entertainment value to the book while others serve less purpose. Marissa as a character is a bit annoying. She's got the self-esteem of a field mouse. Her divorce, while the catalyst for her return home, seems to have affected her less than the family dynamics between her parents, her sister, and herself despite the fact that much of the chaos of this situation is chalked up to her mother's menopause and is supposed to be a recent development. As for Connor, he supposedly doesn't recognize Marissa when he first sees her despite noting the unusual color of her eyes. This is a woman with whom he carried on a secret relationship and with whom he worked at a pizza place for a year and he's back in her home town. Odd.

The chemistry between Marissa and Connor was a little on the light side but given how reluctant either of them are to be together, it works fine. Some of the plot threads are given very short shrift and either should have been developed more or not included even to the extent that they were. Marissa's antagonistic relationship with her sister was not well-examined (or really explained at all). And the interactions with the youth group on both Marissa and Connor's part were few and far between. Given that a situation with the kids is pivotal to the story, the kids themselves and their relationship with the adult authorities (Marissa and Connor) aren't all that well handled. The resolution to this situation is also summed up too quickly for satisfaction. Over all a light and decent modern romance, this one won't wow the socks off of you but it's not a bad effort.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Last year my book club chose The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel as our classic pick. Obviously we have a rather broad and inclusive sense of classics. While I enjoyed that novel way back when, this year, I wanted to read something that had been on my list for a long time, had in fact stood the test of time, and was fairly universally recognized as a classic. So I lobbied hard for Doctor Zhivago. I pointed out the newly done translation. I highlighted the love story aspect. And pushy me, I won the day. So much the worse! Book club is tonight and I'm afraid they are going to lynch me for my choice. Frankly, if I was anyone else but me, I might lynch me too. I have read many other Russian and Societ writers and have never quite felt the dread about returning to their works after putting them down as I did with this one. It was truly a chore.

Ostensibly the story of Yuri Zhivago and Larissa (Lara) Antipova, this a sweeping tale of the early stages of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath shot through with a doomed love story. Zhivago is a physician and a poet (his poetry follows the text of the novel). He is of the priviledged class but initially feels great sympathy with the proletariot. He volunteers to serve in WWI and it is while working as a medic there that he first meets Lara although he had glimpsed her once before in Moscow. Lara, born to wealth, lived through financial struggles with her mother after her father's death and suffered a Lolita-like relationship with the older man who posed as her mother's benefactor. As these two, both already married to others, continue to find each other after the war, through the revolution and then during the hardships and paranoia afterwards, they grow ever closer and eventually unable to resist any longer, fall into an all-consuming affair. But Yuri and Lara's love story is only a minor thread when compared to the sweeping and all-encompassing story of Russia's changes of the time, politically and socially.

The tenor of the Revolution changes in the course of the novel, as do Yuri's feelings about it and its potential. There are long and complicated musings on the philosophical ideology underpinning the Communist Party as versus those underpinning the White Party. Detailed and extensive descriptions of the Russian-Soviet countryside abound as well, with the weather sweeping through it frequently reflecting the desperation and despair accompanying the new regime's policies. It is no surprise, given the criticisms and even just the ambivalences toward the Revolution spelled out in the character of Yuri Zhivago that this was not allowed to be published in Russia and that there was subsequently a "request" by the government that Pasternak not accept the Nobel Prize.

For many unfamiliar with (or not avidly interested in) the details of the Russian Revolution, the story of Yuri and Lara is not enough to counterbalance the heavy political commentary. Even though I do have a decent working knowledge of the time, I found it tedious. Yuri and Lara as characters were flat and uninspired. The number of secondary and incidental characters was enormous and there was far too much information about each of them, especially when their background or views were not necessary to the plot in any way shape or form and their appearance in the tale was as fleeting as possible. Excessive is the word that springs to mind when I think of the novel as a whole, followed closely by boring. As much as I wanted to thrill to it as I did to Tolstoy's works so many years ago, I just couldn't. It's hard for me to say whether the translation had anything to do with the dry, unappealing nature of the novel for me but I don't plan to pick up another version to find out. Quite a disappointment.

Amazon says this about the book: A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.

Monday, January 23, 2012

I am still wading my way through Doctor Zhivago and so didn't get much other reading in this week. When I haven't been fighting with this Russian classic, I have been finally undecorating the Christmas tree so that it will be gone before the workmen come on Tuesday. Terrible that I am only motivated by strangers seeing what a slacker I am! And so once this is done and Pasternak's novel is finally put to bed, I will get back to being able to spend my usual amount of time on books, reading and reviewing. At least I hope so (although with the number of tasks still on my to do now that it's the new year list, I can't guarantee that). This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

Invisible River by Helena McEwenTempted Again by Cathie Linz

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCannDoctor Zhivago by Boris PasternakTantra Goddess by Caroline Muir

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Only one book this week but it looks fantastic. Don't you agree?! This past week's mailbox arrival:

The Baker's Daughter by Sarah McCoy came from Crown for a book tour.A young girl who, with her family, is protected from the worst of WWII by the high ranking Nazi who wants to marry her and her story as she tells it to a reporter with a troubled past sixty years after that fateful final year of the war when Elsie made a decision that changed everything. How delectable this sounds!

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit At Home With Books as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

How well can you ever know someone? How well can you especially know someone who intentionally keeps the past a secret, lying and hiding the truth? And what do you do once that person is gone and the truth comes out?

Ellen's Irish husband, Fintan, always maintained that he was an orphan but after his accidental death, Ellen runs into an old acquaintance who knew him back in Ireland and finds out that he lied to her for years. His mother is in fact alive. As Ellen struggles with her feelings about Fintan's unexpected death, their troubled marriage, and his obvious desire to close her out of his past, she decides that she should go to Ireland uncertain of her own reasons for making a pilgrimage that Fintan obviously would not have wanted or approved.

Once in Ireland, she meets Fintan's crotchety mother and discovers that there was quite a lot she never knew about her husband, much of which explains their fraught and unhappy marriage. Jo Dowd, Ellen's mother-in-law, is an unhappy, tough-as-nails farm woman who mostly keeps to herself. In fact, she doesn't even want a home nurse despite the fact that she has terminal cancer. But despite having only just met Ellen, she is willing to have her daughter-in-law move in and care for her.

As Ellen comes to know Jo and the others in the village, and to hear of more of Fintan's buried past, she comes to learn about forgiveness, how to move forward, how the future can hinge on the smallest of actions and past secrets. As she uncovers the bitter past, the hurts, and the betrayals, her finds sometimes makes the narrative bleed with despair, anger, and hopelessness. Told from the perspectives of multiple narrators and using interspersed flashbacks, there are multiple plot threads weaving through the book that at first seem unconnected but which come to create a complete tapestry by the end of the novel. The writing itself is very visceral and the characters' emotions, while spare seeming actually strike deeply but the over all feeling of the novel is one of hurt, wrongs, resentment, and regret. It has a desolate and anguished tone and even the faintly hopeful ending couldn't change that.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Authors come at writing from many different walks of life. Oftentimes they have had another career first or they have taken another path before realizing that writing is where their passion lies. And sometimes it is easy to guess where authors have come from through their writing. McEwen was an artist before turning her hand to writing and it clearly shows in her incredibly visual, composed, and artistic description in the novel Invisible River.

Opening with Eve on the verge of moving to London to pursue her studies as an art student, she is leaving her worn-down, sad, and alcoholic father, who has cared for her since her mother's death when she was small and she worries about his future knowing that she must break free and pursue her own life. She soon finds a close group of friends at school and starts painting jewel bright London cityscapes in celebration of the vibrant city in which she now lives. Eve also develops a friendship and a secret crush on a second year sculpture student, Zeb, who is already in a relationship.

When she chooses not to go home for Christmas, Eve makes the difficult decision to stay away from her needy father, anxious to conceal from herself just how poorly he is coping on his own. But he comes to find her in London, landing on her doorstep drunk and devastated. Frustrated by his embarrassing presence in her flat and his inability to face his demons, especially his alcoholism, she tells him to leave only to find herself consumed with worry and despair when he actually does disappear. Her cityscapes become riddled with nightmare characters and the colors are muddied and terrible as she embarks on a desperate quest to find him even as she knows he is lost to her, beyond saving.

The imagery in the novel is simply overwhelming and startlingly present. McEwen draws beautiful mental pictures of Eve's paintings, her friends' works, and Zeb's intricate and enchanting sculptures. Certain of her paragraphs are love letters to color and to technique. The art is detailed and full. The characters are not quite as vivid as their works although Eve's nightmares are lucid and phantasmagoric. The actual plot is really just a bildungsroman, Eve's coming of age and straining to break free of the past that she eventually comes to understand will be a part of her forever. The secondary characters' chosen subjects illuminate them as much as any description of them does. And Eve's artistic progression clearly highlights her inner turmoil and struggle. The middle section of the book, the search for Eve's father, overwhelms the framing sections a bit and makes the tone of the ending feel dreamily unearned. Over all though, there is some gorgeous and poetic writing here and McEwen can certainly paint a word picture.

I won a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

Amazon says this about the book: Stewart O'Nan's thirteenth novel is another wildly original, bittersweet gem like his celebrated Last Night at the Lobster. Valentine's weekend, Art and Marion Fowler flee their Cleveland suburb for Niagara Falls, desperate to recoup their losses. Jobless, with their home approaching foreclosure and their marriage on the brink of collapse, Art and Marion liquidate their savings account and book a bridal suite at the Falls' ritziest casino for a second honeymoon. While they sightsee like tourists during the day, at night they risk it all at the roulette wheel to fix their finances-and save their marriage. A tender yet honest exploration of faith, forgiveness and last chances, The Odds is a reminder that love, like life, is always a gamble.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

It's been about a hundred years since I read Lysistrata in college and I remember very little about it now but the idea of the play causing modern women, young and old, in suburban Stellar Plains, New Jersey to eschew sex with their husbands and boyfriends, is certainly an intriguing one. In the play, Lysistrata exhorts the women of the town to forgo sex as a way to force the men to stop a war but here, the girls and women affected by the play's spell don't consciously choose to stop sleeping with their men, they are overcome with a disturbing lack of desire.

Opening with a glimpse into the contented, long-term, and still quite sexually active marriage of Dory and Robby Lang, two high school English teachers with a teenaged daughter, the novel lays out their history together and takes them to the brink of the moment that Dory, overcome by the cold wind of the play's spell, first denies Robby in bed, lying about her sudden lack of desire. As the spell blows through the town, whistling through the lives of the women and stealing away any desire for intimacy they have, no one discusses this strange phenomenon. And no woman connected to the high school and the play escapes the unsettled discontent that accompanies this sudden lack in interest in the opposite sex except the new drama teacher.

Some women, like Dory, attribute it to their age and the diminished sexual drive that comes with it. Others, like Leanne, the guidance counselor who is in several relationships at once, chalk it up to worry about others considering her promiscuous. Marissa, the girl cast as Lysistrata, decides that since sex has never been all that interesting to her, she's done with boys. Bev, the college counselor, hurt by her husband's comment about her weight, backs away from him in bed. Willa, Dory and Robby's daughter, breaks up with Eli, her boyfriend, knowing that the excitement and desire they have as high schoolers will never last given their different trajectories in life. And there are more. But these revelations about why they are no longer interested in sex are all driven not by self-awareness, but by the magic of the Lysistrata play's cold wind spell.

Intended to be an examination of women's body image, desirability, control of themselves, complacency, and social perceptions using Lysistrata, the novel gives short shrift to the idea of political activism as personal also put forward in the play. The men's reactions to the dry spell instigated by the women are not well explored; in fact, they seem almost incidental. While the underlying idea of the novel is appealing, in practice, it didn't quite come off. The initial look at relationships, in their different intensities and stages, was entertaining but then they dragged on a bit too long without giving any particularly new insights into women's sexuality or desire. And the end of the novel is abrupt and oddly unsatisfying. Perhaps trying to balance the philosophical ideas contained in the idea of abstinence and self-worth and still keep the story fairly light in tone was just too much. Not Wolitzer's best but not bad either; a quick read, the novel was just a bit flat, unfortunately missing that spark that makes for a fantastic tale.

This past week has been dreary and rainy yucky here so it was really lovely to open my mailbx and find a book in it twice. Amazing how one little thing can make the day that much brighter. This past week's mailbox arrivals:

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris came from Harper Perennial for a book tour.An elderly woman decides to tell the story of her friendship with a long dead artist who never achieved the fame she thought he was due. I do love to read about creative people and their relationships or muses.

Spin by Catherine McKenzie came from William Morrow for a book tour.Showing up for the job interview of a lifetime still drunk from the previous night's celebrations and landing a different job that will test your loyalty as a result? What a great sounding start to a book!

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit At Home With Books as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Brooding, atmospheric, and with the feel of film noir threading its pages, Manuel Munoz's novel What You See in the Dark is unlike my normal reads, edging close to claustrophobia and hinting of menace. A multi-stranded narrative weaving the tale of a solitary, poor girl, Teresa, and her developing relationship with the town's golden boy, with the spare and unfulfilling, disappearing and seemingly irrelevant life of his mother Mrs. Watson, and the arrival in the town of Bakersfield of a famous Actress and Director (Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock) as they start work on Psycho.

When the narrative focuses on Teresa and Dan, the narration is addressed to the reader as if s/he is a woman in the town whose jealousy over the developing relationship remains palpable even as she pursues her own boyfriend giving that thread of the novel a slightly prurient feel and keeping the reader distant from both Teresa and Dan themselves as characters.

The narration of Arlene Watson's portion of the novel focuses on her feelings, her past and the way in which life has passed her by, leaving her invisible and unable to grasp life and accept the future. There is a resigned inevitability to her character and to her life that bows her head and weighs down her shoulders, manifesting in the story of her abandonment by her husband and in the way in which she cannot see that the motel she owns is going to be obsolete, lonely, and as empty as her bitter life once the new freeway bypasses it.

The portions of the novel concentrating on the Actress and Director take their lead from the reality of movie making. There are technical bits, concerns over character motivation, and the delicate work of creating realistic artifice. The Actress wonders about her role and the trajectory of her career. The Director, exacting and controlled, looks to create art, pushing the boundaries of reality in film only to come up short against these exponentially expanded boundaries in the future.

As all three of the parallel stories wind together, there is a terrifying inevitability and a hopelessness that pervades the novel and the shocking act of violence at its core is neither unexpected nor anticipated. The writing is visually rich and symbolic. Munoz keeps a steady tension throughout the novel, slowly pulling back the shower curtain to show the blood mixing with water and swirling down the drain, disappearing. Quietly desperate and terrible, this forbidding and complex novel tapers off in the end neither embracing the change coming nor eschewing it.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

A tale of adultery that manages to withhold judgment as it traces the impact on all four people touched by an affair, Kylie Ladd's After the Fall is a fascinating glimpse into all sides of a story. Couples Kate and Cary and Luke and Cressida are good friends but when Kate and Luke cross the line with a very public kiss, things start to spiral out of control. And instead of backing off from each other, they are irresistibly drawn together in a full blown affair.

Told in short chapters alternating mainly from the four major characters' first person points of view, these psychological snapshots allow the reader deeply into the heads and hearts of each of the characters. Kate, Cary, Luke, and Cressida each start their narration in the aftermath of the affair and their anger, sorrow, guilt, and despair sound almost like notes made for a therapy session. From there, they work backwards, giving the background of their own marriages as well as of their connections to each other and the way that they reached the harmful and hurting place that each of them came to inhabit.

Certainly it would be easy to demonize Kate and Luke for devastating Cary and Cressida and having their affair but Ladd offers no such easy moralizing. Each of her characters is human, flawed and to be pitied. Although the novel opens after the end of the affair, there is still a palpable tension as Kate and Luke move towards each other and and the feeling of breath being held as Cary and Cressida stumble on the truth. The end is a realistic unraveling surprising for its truth. Ladd's training as a psychologist is clearly evident in her deep mining for motivation and explanation in each of her characters and she has drawn a taut, intense read.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Jane Green's characters are growing up. Sure, some of them are still looking for love, but many of them are now older and settled and facing the curveballs that life throws us all. In this wonderful, affecting tale of women, families, and friendship, she tackles that most heartrending of all curveballs: terminal illness.

Callie is a sought after photographer, happily married to the love of her life, and the mother of two young children. She is also a breast cancer survivor on the brink of her five years cancer-free. Her younger sister Steffi is becoming a celebrated vegan chef in NYC. She is a bit of a free spirit who has no desire to settle down and who has an instant attraction to the bad boys of the world, musicians, artists, etc. Lila, Callie's college roommate, has become an honorary sister to the Tollemache girls. She's very different from the radiantly happy Callie and the go-with-the-flow Steffi but she is finally in a relationship that fulfills her and allows her to be herself, even if her boyfriend is not a Jewish doctor but a Protestant Brit with a nasty ex-wife.

Callie's husband Reece travels often for work but when he is home, he and Callie have an incredibly strong and loving marriage. They live a fairly typical suburban existence, enjoying their friends, supporting their kids, and going about the daily life of living. Steffi, meanwhile is starting to get restless with her rock musician boyfriend so she offers to dog sit for Mason while he and his family spend a year in London. She knows that her boyfriend loathes dogs so she also knows that she is ending their relationship with this choice. Luckily Mason has a country home sitting untenanted only a few towns from Callie's that Steffi can use. This affords her the opportunity to change her life entirely, quitting her job and finding out what she really wants out of life, which surprisingly appears to include a quiet country life. Lila is moving on and committing whole heartedly to Ed and their future although she must decide whether her objection to motherhood or his desire to have more children (he has a son with his ex) will win out.

As all of their lives are moving forward, Callie starts to suffer from an intense headache that will not go away ultimately ending up in the hospital. When she is diagnosed with a recurrence of her cancer, this time contracting the rare leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, her family and friends circle around her as she travels a road that only she can travel.

Green has created likable, charming characters with whom the reader can identify. Even her minor characters like Walter and Honor, Callie and Steffi's incredibly mismatched parents, are well-rounded and realistic. And she has captured the devastation a terminal diagnosis has on everyone in this poignant and yet ultimately celebratory novel. As one life winds down, other lives must by definition continue forward despite the grief and uncertainty of the future and Green has illustrated this beautifully in the swirl of characters around Callie. There is some unecessarily heavy-handed foreshadowing of Callie's fate in the beginning of the book with reiterations of how happy and blessed she is in her life but overall, the whole of the gentle and loving narrative make this a minor flaw. The recipes following each chapter, are quite appealing even if sometimes a bit forced to fit with the narrative.

A look at abiding love and the constancy of family, this novel will probably appeal most to fans of women's fiction. And those who read the author's note about her friend Heidi will appreciate what a lovely tribute this is to a dear friend's memory.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

I have read a number of books over the years, both fiction and non-fiction, set in Asian countries close to the Himalayas. The majesty of this area of the world has me in thrall without me ever leaving my chair. The magnificence of nature here sometimes overshadows the human element but in the hands of the right writer, I can be equally captured by the reality of the people who live in these rugged, remote, and often terribly poor countries. But I didn't really have a good sense of the turmoil and poverty in the midst of all the grandeur, especially in Nepal. This book has changed that a bit for me and certainly put a human face (or faces) on the sad and desperate social situation facing this small mountainous country sandwiched between India and China.

After eight years working for the EastWest think tank, Conor Grennan decided that he wanted to spend a year going around the world. To make his trip seem less frivolous, he signed up to start his journey in Nepal, volunteering at an orphange for 3 months. He didn't really have any experience with children and had very little idea what to expect at the Little Princes Children's Home. But working at an orphanage was certainly admirable and staved off criticism for his around the world year. At the outset, Grennan had no concept of how much the first three months of his journey would change him and how the children at the orphanage would burrow into his heart.

Coming back to Nepal after his year in the world, he discovered, quite by accident, that the children at Little Princes (named for the St. Exupery character) were not in fact orphans. They had been rescued from child traffickers. And it was the desperate, unsuccessful race to pluck seven more trafficked children from the dire situation in which they were living, even as the civil war escalated throughout the country, that drove Grennan and his colleague Farid to create the NGO Next Generation Nepal. Their initial vow to find these seven children, stop the abomination of child trafficking, and find the families of all the lost children remains a driving force behind the organization.

Ten years of civil war in Nepal caused more casualties than just among those fighting. When men went through remote villages and offered parents the opportunity to send their children to safety in Kathmandu, away from Maoist rebels who would forcibly conscript the children into their armies, to a place with abundant food, to a place where their children could receive an education, the parents gave everything they had to these men in return for the promise of a better life for the children. Unfortunately, the truth was that they paid these child traffickers who only turned around and sold the children into slavery, abandoned them to starve, or worse. It is these stolen children that Next Generation Nepal seeks to find and reunite with their families.

Part travelogue, part coming of age tale, part love story, part social conscience, part crusade, part call to action, this tale is wonderfully told and completely engrossing. Grennan is honest about the hard realities of Nepalese life, the corruption found there, and the oftentimes ineffectual politics. But he writes beautifully, affectionately, and from the heart about the people, the place, and the children he carries in his heart forever. His self-deprecating humor shines throughout the narrative making for a highly entertaining read. As Grennan experiences life, learns and changes personally, searches nearly inaccessible villages for parents of the lost children, celebrates successes, and agonizes over failures in this struggling and impoverished country, the reader is swept into the childrens' lives as well as into Grennan's own developing personal life. I dare anyone turning these pages not to fall in love with the enchanting imps at Little Princes and invite them to root for Grennan as he makes the world a better place, one child, one family at a time.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each copy of Little Princes will be donated to Next Generation Nepal and will help go towards getting more of these lost children out of the hands of child traffickers and home again.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I love to cook and enjoy hearing people tell me I am good at it. The reality is that I follow a recipe with the best of them. The fact that I need to follow someone else's directions in the kitchen has not stopped me from the occasional daydream about working as a chef in a restaurant. Luckily there are creative, wonderful, impeccably trained chefs out there who can actually indulge their dream.

Georgia, the main character in Georgia's Kitchen, is a rising star in the restaurant world, working as head chef in the kitchen of another chef's eponymously named restaurant. She is engaged to a successful lawyer whom her mother adores. She has dreams of one day opening her own restaurant. It seems like her life is charmed. But then her life comes crashing down around her ears: a poor review unfairly blamed on her, fired from her job, and dumped by her fiance. So she reevaluates her life and heads to Italy to refresh her skills and work in a rustic Italian kitchen in a brand new restaurant. Once she arrives in Tuscany, she discovers that the amazing job she's come for isn't exactly what she's expected. And what Italian-set novel would be complete without a gorgeous neighbor? Gianni owns the vineyard next door to the restaurant and he is completely tempting to Georgia. But the focus here is really on Georgia and the life she is creating, learning, and testing.

Nelson captures the allure of Tuscany and does a wonderful job evoking the place. While the plot is romantic and charming, Nelson does a good job creating Georgia as a main character who learns to be true to herself rather than writing a standard "woman handed life-long dream thanks to intervention of gorgeous man" novel. In fact, all of the characters do a pretty good job of defying stereotype and come off as entertaining and sympathetic to the reader. There's a feeling of gentle insistence as the plot unspools toward Georgia's ultimate decision. The supporting characters are well drawn and the tale, while occasionally predictable, is ultimately delightfully feel-good. There's enough meat here to make this a winner for book clubs although you might run into the problem of everyone liking it too much to have a varied discussion. Not necessarily a bad problem to have. A fun and mouth-watering read, I thoroughly enjoyed Georgia and want her to come and cook for me.

Amazon says this about the book: Maya is an accomplished psychiatry resident with a terrific boyfriend, loving family, and bustling New York social life. When her grandmother dies in India, a family squabble over property results in a curse that drifts across continents and threatens Maya's life. Or so her father says-- Maya (being a modern woman, an American, and a doctor) doesn't believe in curses, Brahman, or otherwise. But when her father suffers a heart attack, her sister miscarries, and her career and relationship both start to falter, Maya starts to worry. A trip back to India with her best friend Heidi, Maya reasons, will be just what's needed to remove the curse, save her family, and to put her own life back in order. Thus begins a journey into Maya's parallel world-- an India filled with loving and annoying relatives, vivid colors, and superstitious customs--a cross-cultural, transcontinental search to for a chance to find real love.

Monday, January 9, 2012

I had a very busy week this past week what with trying to accomplish some of the organizational stuff on my new years' list. My pantry and several other areas that no one else in the world will ever see now look great but focusing on those spaces that were driving me nuts (and I won't admit how many of them there still are left to tackle!) left me not so much time to read or review. Still, a reasonable amount accomplished in this first week of the year. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan JepsonLittle Princes by Conor GrennanPromises to Keep by Jane Green

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCannDoctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Friday, January 6, 2012

I do enjoy the occasional romance but I don't tend to read western-set historical romances. Unlike some readers, cowboys don't really appeal to me so I generally avoid the whole sub-genre. But I was challenged to read a romance out of my comfort zone so I scoured my stacks and found The Wedding Cake Wars. It is western-set and as a bonus, there's not a cowboy in sight.

The novel opens with Lolly Mayfield on a train arriving in tiny Maple Falls, Oregon from Kansas to marry a complete stranger. She's having second (and third) thoughts about her impetuosity in agreeing to be a mail order bride when she discovers that she is in fact going to be in a contest with two other women to win the groom, former Confederate soldier, Kellen Macready. She agrees, with misgivings, to the contest.

Kellen Macready is getting older and is willing to get married; he's just not willing to lose his heart in the process. So he agrees to the charity scheme cooked up by the Ladies of Maple Falls Helpful Society to raise money for a new schoolhouse. Three "brides" will compete to marry the Colonel, participating in various contests, including a treasure hunt, a kiss, and a wedding cake bake-off.

Aside from Lolly, the potential brides are a southern belle from New Orleans and a local woman who has been in love with the Colonel since she was a tiny girl. Each of them is determined to be the winner but sparks really start to fly between Lolly and Kellen. Neither of them is comfortable with their reaction to the other. Their attraction and the comfort he feels with Lolly scares Kellen and Lolly's father fought and died for the Union while Kellen was a Confederate officer. But the sparks mean nothing if Lolly doesn't win the contest.

The whole concept of a competition to get married is fun and offers comical situations. The contests themselves are entertaining and the characters are all likable, even Lolly's co-competitors. The major conflict threatening to keep Kellen and Lolly apart is overcome a bit too easily but overall this is a delightful romp for romance lovers.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

China has long enchanted me (all of Asia does, actually) and the historic family dynamics with several generations living under one roof in harmony and in discord in this largest of all countries have long seemed exotic to me. The long history and the unknowns of a society so long closed to the West have always been appealing to learn about. The desire for a son and heir and the lack of worth of daughters is completely foreign but still fascinating to me. So this novel had all the hallmarks of a book I would thoroughly enjoy. Much to my surprise, I was left with a lukewarm reaction.

In 1930's Shanghai, in a world on the verge of massive change, Feng lives with her mother, father, older sister, and grandfather. Her sister is the major focus of her mother's energies, leaving Feng, who, it is assumed, will care for her parents in their old age, to the love and company of her grandfather. While her sister, selfish, spoiled, and unfeeling, commands every bit of attention on herself and her upcoming marriage into a socially superior family, seventeen year old Feng wanders in the next door gardens with her grandfather, meeting a boy, Bi, from a distant village. As she starts to fantasize about life with Bi, she is only partially cognizant of the looming disaster in her own home. And when she, as a dutiful Chinese daughter, must step in and marry the unappealing suitor chosen for her sister, relinquishing all hopes of a quiet country life, she does so unhesitatingly.

When she marries into the Sang family, Feng is young and clumsy, not the polished, slick young woman her sister was, and she suffers scorn and cruelty at the hands of her new in-laws. Her husband is kind enough but he is a dutiful son and under his parents' thumb so does as he is commanded without a thought to his fearful wife's wants or well-being. Feng is miserable having only her maid Yan in whom to confide and to trust for guidance and friendship. And it her maid Yan to whom she confide the terrible act of revenge she plots against her situation and all those who surround her. It is Yan who must carry out her mistress' awful plan, the plan that will haunt Feng for the rest of her life.

Feng is an unlikable character, growing from a naive, uncomplicated young woman drifting through life into a bitter, nasty, warped, and hateful woman. Having been forced to live her sister's life, she finally becomes her cruel sister. Were this dislike on the reader's part intentionally incurred on the author's part, it would perhaps be acceptable but I suspect that in actual fact, we are to view Feng's changed character with sympathy given her situation. Maybe the cultural divide is too great or our experiences too different but I found myself unable to feel any sympathy and this colored how I felt about the novel as a whole. Certainly Feng had a neglectful upbringing, knowing that she was of no worth to her parents. Certainly she was in a loveless arranged marriage. Certainly she was ill-treated by her in-laws, holding no value to them except as a vessel to produce an heir. But the way in which she stewed over the injustices done to her and the life-altering revenge she chose to deny everyone who had wronged her what they had so hoped for (but which she never divulged so only she tasted the bitterness of her horrible, and ultimately regretted triumph) was beyond the pale.

The writing itself is very evocative and draws the rarified world of upper class Shanghai well. As a domestic drama set mainly in the constrained world of women, there is little intrusion from the outside world. Surely there should have been though, as China suffered a brutal occupation and lengthy war with Japan, including the bloody Battle of Shanghai, a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the rise of Mao Zedong and his harsh policies. There is little mention of these massive changes during the narrative despite the fact that the Sang family, as part of Shanghai's wealthy ruling elite, would have been gravely (and likely very adversely) affected by each of these historical instances. And their passing references glossed over the brutality and hardship that would have accompanied these events.

The characters in the novel are quite simple with only Feng and her husband showing any growth or dimensionality. The setting is interesting but given short shrift and the historical is all but ignored until the very end of the story. There are a few coincidences too fantastic, just a bit too deus ex machina in the plot and the great leap forward in time after Feng's son is born is slightly disorienting. This was a good enough read, spoiled a bit by Feng's character, but it missed out on being so much more given the time and the setting.

For more information about Duncan Jepson and the book visit his webpage. Follow the rest of the blog tour or look at the amazon reviews for others' thoughts and opinions on the book.

Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Monday, January 2, 2012

A new year, a new start. I'm not carrying over the books that still haven't been reviewed from last year although I will most likely go back to many (all?) of them eventually. But I like the idea of a completely clean slate so here's the first edition of 2012. This meme is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Books I completed this past week are:

More Than Words Can Say by Robert BarclayThe Juliet Spell by Douglas ReesOur Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

Let the Great World Spin by Colm McCannAll the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson

It has been quite a long time since I did one of these posts and I've gotten some great looking books in the mail that should have their own shot at being highlighted. So I'm going to go ahead and list them all, despite this being far more than a week's worth of arrivals. This past several month's mailbox arrivals:

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson came from William Morrow for a book tour.In 1930's Shanghai, Feng must be a dutiful daughter and marry the wealthy man her parents have chosen even though she will lead a life of misery and unhappiness, leading to an act of revenge that will resonate throughout her entire life. Set during major upheavals in 20th century China, this looks fascinating.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes came from Katya at Penguin.A woman about to lose her job and a man whose will to live was crushed by his motorcycle accident come together and change each other forever. I suspect I'm going to need tissues with this one.

Queen Elizabeth in the Garden by Trea Martyn came from Meryl Zegarek Public Relations.A look at the way that the two most important men in Queen Elizabeth I's life, Dudley and Cecil, used their elaborate gardens to appeal to their Queen. A completely different angle on history, despite my less than green thumb, I am looking forward to this one.

Little Princes by Conor Grennan came from William Morrow for a book tour.The account of an American who worked in an orphanage in Nepal and ultimately vowed to save these little boys, this should be a lovely and inspirational book.

A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer DuBois came from The Dial Press for a book tour.Combining a former Russian world chess champion turned politician with a young woman facing a diagnosis of Huntington's Disease, the same fatal disease that claimed her father's life, this double stranded narrative sounds very different and enticing.

You're (Not) the One by Alexandra Potter came from Plume.A woman who once wished to be with her boyfriend forever and sealed that wish with a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, is now unable to be shed of him no matter how much she might want it. Looks like frothy fun.

The Dressmaker by Kate Alcott came from Doubleday.A young woman hired to be Lady Duff Gordon's dressmaker on the Titanic who survives the sinking is caught up in the media frenzy after the accident. Aside from the fact that the cover is delectable, it sounds riveting.

MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche came from Random House.Bertsche spends one year looking for a best friend like the ones she left behind when she moved from New York to Chicago.

Girl on the Cliff by Lucinda Riley came from Penguin.A woman reeling from a miscarriage comes back to her family in rural Ireland, befriends a lonely little girl in the big house on the cliff, and uncovers a family secret that changes the course of her life.

As always, if you'd like to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit At Home With Books as she is hosting this month's Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

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About Me

A voracious reader, fledgling runner, and full time kiddie chauffeur.
If anyone out there wants to send me books for review (oh please don't fro me in that briar patch!), you can contact me at whitreidsmama (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you do write me there, put the blog name in the subject line or I'm liable to send the unread message to spam. My book review policy can be found here.